


With More Successful Hope Resolve

by SharpestRose



Category: Devilman (Anime & Manga), Devilman Crybaby - Fandom
Genre: AU, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-26
Updated: 2018-01-31
Packaged: 2019-03-09 20:36:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 6
Words: 18,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13489284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SharpestRose/pseuds/SharpestRose
Summary: "I want to go back to Japan. Find out where Akira is now. I want to live there."Ryou makes a decision in childhood that changes everything.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic draws on background lore from Devilman Lady and other Devilman-related titles, but it's not necessary to have read those to read this. Rating will increase later on when the characters are older. Title is from Paradise Lost and I'm not even sorry.

Other children seemed to seek physical comfort and affection constantly, hugging and wrestling and chasing and holding hands, as if touch was a sensory extension of the laughter and play they shared. Ryou rarely played, rarely laughed, but he didn't mind it when Jenny held him on her lap and hugged him sometimes.

It was nice. It made him think of something he couldn't remember properly, of some other soft, grown-up body that had held him once upon a time. Jenny held him the same way, like there was something reverent in the act, something worshipful.

There were a lot of things Ryou couldn't remember properly, and even though being cradled in his guardian's arms gave him such a strong sense of deja vu, it was even harder to hold onto whole, coherent thoughts when he was cuddled up close to her like that. Being that close to Jenny always made his thoughts feel muddled, somehow.

Ryou hated feeling muddled. Clarity of thought made him feel more in control, less small and helpless and ineffectual. Childhood frustrated him in a way it didn't seem to bother any of his peers.

So there was always a hesitancy in him about being hugged by Jenny, because it would lead to his head feeling stuffy and sleepy and strange. He didn't think she did it on purpose. Perhaps it was a side-effect of the way she only ever spoke directly into his mind, rather than moving her mouth and vocal cords to do it. 

Strange mysteries didn't bother Ryou. Science would find the explanation sooner or later, and he rather liked the idea that not everything had been discovered yet. Maybe when he was older he'd be the one to solve the puzzle of Jenny's eccentricities.

For all that he hated feeling muddled, Ryou never turned down those occasional times when Jenny would find him awake long past his bed-time, scowling at a book slightly too advanced for his comprehension skills. She'd put the book aside on the nightstand and sit on the edge of his bed, gathering him up into her arms and holding him like he was a precious, holy gift until he fell asleep.

It was nice. Touch, human contact -- people needed that to survive, no matter how self-sufficient they might strive to be. And Ryou had precious little other touch in his life.

* * *

 

One morning Ryou stared out the window at the neatly kept, expensive suburban neighbourhood, at the children walking in groups towards the same extremely prestigious Catholic elementary school that he attended. Jenny always seemed to take especial happiness in dropping him off there in the morning. Or, no, perhaps happiness wasn't quite the correct word. The feeling radiating off Jenny in those moments was more akin to glee, as if someone had told her a very funny joke.

"I miss Akira."

Jenny glanced at him from behind the wheel, her smile as fixed and glossy as always.  _The boy from the village?_  she asked. Her memory was much better than Ryou's; she never seemed to forget anything.

"Yes."

_He was ordinary. There are lots of others like him. Your school must have dozens of other children as unremarkable as he was._

"No." Ryou shook his head. "He was a crybaby and brave at the same time. That's not ordinary. American boys aren't crybabies, except the ones who get beaten up for it by bullies. Akira used to be the one who stopped bullies from beating others. He used to stop the ones who tried to pick on me."

Jenny's hands flexed on the steering wheel, like she was imagining that she was really holding the fragile necks of cruel children.  _What reason would they have to pick on you?_

Ryou shrugged. "They called me foreigner, because I was so pale. I get called it here, as well, because of my Japanese accent. I'm a stranger everywhere."

_Those born to rule are never comfortable in the dirt._

He scowled at her. "If I grow up to be a leader of something, it'll be because I chose it, Jenny. I don't like it when you act like I'm special. People in charge should be in charge because they're good at it and they want it, not just because."

Her smile never changed its shape even the slightest bit, but there was something warm and indulgent in the tone of her thoughts, as if she thought he was being adorably naive.

_Of course, Ryou. You will be a self-made lord._

"Anyway, we're getting off the topic. I want to see Akira. What if he's got nobody to look after him when he's being a crybaby?" 

Ryou, traces of his scowl lingering, huffed a sigh at the moving view beyond the window. He didn't voice the other worry he felt: what if Akira had somebody else to look after him, some other child who needed protecting from bullies who wanted to pick on the foreign, the different, the seemingly weak?

"I'm sick of America." He knew he was getting dangerously close to whining, which was a trait he disliked about himself. Childish petulance was a habit he'd have to try to break in himself. "I want to go back to Japan. Find out where Akira is now. I want to live there."

Any reasonable guardian or parent would have ignored the demand, or argued with it while having no intention of indulging such an outrageous whim. Jenny just turned the car around and drove back towards their comfortably austere townhouse, full of the while blank smoothness that Ryou found so pleasing.

He perked up at the change of direction. "Really? We're going?"

_Yes. While I can't see the appeal of the child's company myself, your own attachment is something that seems worth pursuing for the sake of your self-awareness. Education is to be found in places other than books and classes, after all._

_Your full future self will appreciate whatever lesson you gain through being drawn to him._

Jenny didn't sound entirely pleased about the situation, but Ryou didn’t care. Filled with delight at the possibilities in the future, a rare, childlike laugh escaped from him.

* * *

 

When Ryou took his turn walking through through the security scanners at the airport that night, the guards tried to take his boxcutter away. All it took was one of Jenny’s steady, unblinking stares is enough to leave them glassy-eyed and pliable, however, and so Ryou had the comforting little shape of the knife safely in his pocket as he settled into his first class seat. 

People often attempted to take the blade from him. Jenny had been called to the school on near innumerable occasions when one teacher or another had found out about it. There were never any records kept of these incidents, and nobody but Ryou ever remembered them, so every time somebody discovered it was a brand new annoyance.

He was grateful that Jenny never questioned his wish to keep the boxcutter despite all the trouble it caused. As erudite as he knew he was for his age, Ryou still found himself at a loss for words as to how to explain that he needed it.

It wasn’t a matter of self-defence, not exactly. It was something simpler than that. An autonomy. He could protect himself from threats with it if the need arose, certainly, but having the boxcutter meant that he could offer a quick, less painful death, if death was an inevitability.

Ryou couldn’t say why it was so desperately important to him that he have control over the circumstances of his own death, or the deaths of others. All he knew was that he always felt an oppressive, terrifying sense of other forces guiding him, as if he was nothing but a little white rat running through a maze, watched by the uncaring gaze of some being beyond his comprehension.

 _Get some sleep, if you can_ , Jenny told him. She was leafing through a magazine, ignoring the way the nearby flight attendant was very openly ogling down the low open collar of her shirt.

Jenny hadn’t often brought lovers back to the townhouse. Ryou had a strong preference for white decor, and while Jenny had never explained in detail he’d nevertheless got the impression that all her passions were violent ones, and better taken care of elsewhere. And police investigations were a little more difficult to deal with than elementary school disciplinary actions, so that was another reason for Jenny to keep that part of her life separate from the time she spent raising Ryou.

 _Raising_. She always seemed gleeful when she used that word, the same way she did whenever he mentioned anything related to the religious instruction he was taught at school. Ryou had long since stopped caring what her eccentricities meant. Any parent or guardian would have quirks of personality; there was no reason for him to assume that his own should be exempt just because she was in other ways so singular.

Now, Ryou did his best to follow her suggestion, and settled back in his seat. He was excited at the thought of seeing Akira again, but letting that excitement interrupt his sleep schedule would be foolish. 

Turbulence woke him, jolting him out of sleep with a movement hard enough to snap his neck forward and make him bite his tongue.

There was barely time for him to remember where he was before the first crack of lightning hit the plane, followed by a second and third strike before the first was finished. 

They kept coming and coming, like a barrage of gunfire but made of fire and heat and power, ripping the flimsy metal of the plane apart around him.

The tear ripped through the cabin right below Ryou’s seat, wrenching him away from Jenny as the two halves fell away from each other. He heard her shout of surprise and worry inside his head, but only for a moment, and then he couldn’t hear her.

Everything was darkness and chaos and grinding noise. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t see. His seatbelt kept him tethered to his chair, but his chair was falling through rushing nothingness.

Ryou knew the exact moment that Jenny died. His mind tore open, one long jagged slice like a boxcutter to the brain, everything exposed and raw and spilling out.

He screamed and clutched at the sides of his head, as if he could hold himself together. It felt like overwhelming physical pain, because the enormity of it was too much for his weak little human synapses to process any other way.

The seatbelt and part of the ruptured cabin disintegrated to nothing around him, leaving him falling free and untethered through the air.

Survival instinct almost made him revert to his true form, but even in the midst of such a maelstrom of chaos Satan knew that it would be idiotic to do that. The attack on the plane must have been Michael’s doing, and there was still a slim chance that he didn’t know what Satan’s human form was. Michael may have been targeting Jenny’s psychic signature, and be ignorant of the current shape of Satan’s own.

No. No. No. Not Satan. Ryou. He was Ryou. He was...

The shreds of the human identity he’d worn, short in years even by the tiny scale of human lifespans, clung to the edges of Satan’s consciousness.

 _I cannot cease to be myself. I must endure. I must see Akira again_.

That grounded him, knit the frayed strands of himself back into Ryou once again. He stopped screaming, more because there was no air left in him than for any other reason. The horror he felt was more than large enough to warrant endless shrieks.

Ryou let himself fall and fall and fall until he reached the black waters of the ocean far below. Now that Jenny was gone, and his all memories were there to recall once more, Ryou knew that he’d been in this position before.

Then, the waves had eventually carried him to shore, to Akira. This time, he could direct his course enough to make sure the same thing happened again. Surviving such a trip wouldn’t be a big enough miracle to attract Michael’s attention. Hopefully.

Ryou would have laughed at that, if he’d had the ability to laugh at anything in that moment. What a joke. The optimism of the damned.

He lay on his back on the ocean’s surface and stared up at the moons high above, and waited for morning.


	2. Chapter 2

Even with all the protection against the elements he could provide himself with, Ryou was barely alive by the time he reached the shore. He crawled onto the sand and heaved up bile, his stomach too empty to bring up anything else. His skin was waterlogged and pruned, corpse-white in some places and lobster-red from burns in others. He'd had to shed his clothes to make staying afloat easier.

It was night again now, late enough that the beach was deserted. Ryou crawled across the sand to the small tourist parking lot beyond the dunes, wincing at every aching movement. There were abrasions all over his body, and sand and salt made them all sting terribly.

The shower head in the parking lot spluttered and groaned before spitting out a tepid sprinkle of water over him. Ryou wasn't completely certain that water intended for rinsing off holiday swimmers was potable, but thirst was clawing at the inside of his throat and so he gulped it down gratefully regardless. If it made him ill and he subsequently died of dehydration then he was no worse off than if he didn't drink and collapsed right there on the cracked asphalt.

As soon as the urgent desperation of needing fresh water was taken care of, a thousand other demands clamoured for his attention: he was hungry, he was sore and feverish and miserable, a migraine was screaming behind his eyes.

Most of all, Ryou was weary. The weight of millennia pressed down on his skinny shoulders.

It had been years since he'd been on this beach, but he remembered a cave off among the rocks that they'd been forbidden from playing near. The space was too small and narrow for an adult to get inside, and so children were absolutely under no circumstances to even think about exploring it.

Finding the little entrance took some time, but once Ryou had squeezed inside he found that the space opened up somewhat, and that he could stand without having to bend over. It was cold and dark, the rocky ground uneven and jagged, but it was dry and quiet. If nothing else, it was safer than the open sea.

Ryou lay down and closed his eyes and slept. 

* * *

A gentle shake of his shoulder woke him. He darted away from it before he was even fully conscious, self-protective instincts driving him to get his back against the wall. His hands scrabbled for his boxcutter, lost and rusting out at sea. Panic made his breath quick and sharp.

 "It's all right. I won't hurt you."

Another child, no larger than himself. A girl, judging by the style of bathing suit they were wearing and the flower-shaped plastic clip holding back their hair.

 "Do you want some water?" the girl asked, holding out a refillable sports bottle. Ryou was relieved to find he hadn't lost any of his proficiency in Japanese, and then wondered whether he'd still remember it so perfectly if Jenny was alive. Did the child Ryou really impeccably remember a language he hadn't used in years, or was it simply that the fallen angel Satan knew all the tongues of the Earth?

His head hurt so much.

"Are you thirsty?" the girl prompted, an anxious look on her holiday-tanned face. Ryou nodded and took the bottle from her, sipping at the chilled drink. If the soul inside him hadn't known better, he'd have thought that the mouthful of cold water was pure heaven.

"You can have my towel for now," his young visitor went on, her tone taking on the ruthlessly sensible tone he'd heard other girls use on boys when they needed gentle bullying for their own sake. "There are real clothes you can wear back at the house, but you can't walk there naked."

Ryou pulled his knees up to his chest, suddenly sharply aware of his own nudity. The two halves of himself were split on the issue: Satan didn't see what the problem was -- bodily shame was part of the flawed, fallen idiocy of being cast from Eden, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the perfection of angelic beings; Ryou, on the other hand, had always preferred to wear modest clothing when possible, uncomfortable with being exposed more than necessary.

For now his human side won out, and if he hadn't been so sunburned he would have blushed.

"Oh, don't worry, I have a baby brother," the girl told him with a grin, unfolding the faded swimming towel in her hands and draping it over him like a blanket. "I've changed him lots of times. My name's Miki, what's yours?"

Memories older than the world stirred in Ryou's head. He squeezed his eyes shut, as if that could possibly be enough to drive them out. "Do you have any food?" he asked. His voice was a rasp, and hurt coming out.

"There's food at the house. Come on, Mrs Fudou will give you as much as you want. They have lots and lots of medicines, too, so we can put dressings on your cuts."

_Fudou_. Akira!

For a moment, happiness washed over Ryou, and then dread slammed into him and left his heart racing in horror. He could remember an end to Akira's parents, even if he wasn't sure how to fit this knowledge into a timeline that made sense.

He could remember an end for all of them. This little girl, hardly grown older at all before her violent death. Akira, whom Ryou had changed into something stronger and deadlier as a way to save him but who had died anyway. They'd all died. All of it had ended. Satan had sat beside Akira's body and wept, making no attempt at escape as Michael drew close and raised his sword...

"You have to get out of here," Ryou rasped, pushing the towel back into Miki's hands. "You have to get away from me."

She frowned. "You look afraid. I told you, I won't hurt you."

He wanted to laugh. "It's you who should be afraid, Miki Makimura. Being near me is a death sentence." 

_It's all a death sentence. All of it. The Revelation comes and the whole world turns to fire._

Worry creased a line between her eyebrows and she opened her mouth to say something. Before she could, Ryou spoke again.

"Do you hate your baby brother?"

Her mouth snapped shut and her eyes narrowed. "What? No. He's my brother, I love him."

"Yes, yes, of course," Ryou agreed dismissively. "But do you hate him?"

Miki gave a little frown. "He's sick all the time. He cries all night and he has to see specialists. My parents are exhausted by it. They don't... They don't have time for me anymore. That's why I'm here for the summer, staying with their friends. I love him, but I..."

"Resent him?" Ryou offered as a guess. The part of him that was Satan remembered that feeling, remembered how poisonously jealous he'd felt of all humankind, God's new special favourite creation, held up above all those who'd worked so hard for so long to be worthy of that same love.

"Stupid, huh? To be envious of a sick baby." Miki gave a self-deprecating little chuckle. "Pretty childish."

"You're a child. It would be strange if you weren't childish on occasion," Ryou pointed out.

"Miki! Miki, where are you? Miki!"

For a moment, the sound of the calling voice was enough to freeze Ryou with shock, which meant he was too slow to grab Miki before she bounced up and ran to the tiny mouth of the cave, sticking her head and shoulders out to shout back a reply.

"Akira, over here! Come and see!"

Akira. Akira was here.

Ryou's teeth began to chatter, as if he was still submerged in the open ocean. His skin tightened into gooseflesh, and his shoulders shook. 

"Miki, we're not allowed to come in here, it's dangerous. What...  _Ryou?!_ "

He was there, standing in the wedge of light afforded by the mouth of the cave, young and worried and human and alive, soft hair and soft features, not yet merged with something harder in order to preserve him and even that hadn't been enough, even then he'd died.

Ryou couldn't remember the specifics, but he could remember that much. 

He missed Jenny. He hoped that she was somewhere safe, that she was all right. What did death even mean, if the cycle repeated itself over and over?

"Is this world even real?" he asked Akira. "Or is it all just a pageant played out over and over to punish me? Are you really Akira? Are you really here?"

Akira knelt down, in front of where Ryou sat curled in on himself. "You're crying." His voice was quiet and gentle. He touched his fingers to Ryou's cheek, and they came away wet.

Nothing made sense. None of it. But Akira was gathering Ryou in his arms, and even with all his aches and scrapes and bruises Ryou clung on tight, burying his face in Akira's shoulder.

"I don't understand," he sobbed. "I don't understand any of it."

"It's all right. You're safe now," Miki repeated again, trying to be soothing.

"No, no, I'm not. Nothing is. And being near me is the most dangerous of all. You have to-"

"You're delirious," Akira told him quietly. "We'll take you home and my mother can-"

"No." Ryou pushed himself out of Akira's embrace, staring him in horror. "Nobody can know I'm here. Absolutely nobody. I need to stay hidden."

"What you need is food and clothes and more water," Miki pointed out. "But... I guess we could bring those here, without you coming to the house. Just for now, until you're sensible."

"Get me a knife, too." Even with clothes, he'd feel naked without a blade nearby. "...Please."

* * *

She brought him a breadknife, long and sharp and serrated. Ryou used it to cut slices off the loaf she brought, and the block of cheese. 

Akira supplied him with shorts and a t-shirt. Ryou pulled on the shorts -- for the sake of Akira's modesty, since Miki still didn't care either way -- but left the shirt off, because it would have been too harsh and painful to wear it against his broken skin.

"We have to tell somebody," Akira insisted. "Kids can't look after a kid."

Ryou shook his head, swallowing the mouthful he'd been chewing. "It'll be fine. I just need a computer. I have a lot of secret savings accounts, and I know ways of making money online. Jenny always made sure I was prepared for any eventuality."

A roaring empty coldness yawned open wide inside him at the thought of Jenny. Akira's eyes welled with tears.

"Ryou. You're crying again."

Ryou wrenched himself back from the icy void inside him. "No I'm not. I'm fine."

"I wish you'd tell us what's happening. Why are boys so stupid about talking?" Miki scowled in frustration.

"Hey, that's not fair. Girls are too," Akira protested, looking wounded. "Just because you blog all the time doesn't mean other people know how to say what they're thinking. I bet most of your friends don't, even the girl ones."

Miki paused, like she was giving his words due consideration. "All right. You're right. But boys are  _especially_  stupid."

Ryou gave a soft snort of amusement. "I'm not certain I even count as a boy anymore," he murmured to himself.

"I'm the one who found you, and it sure looked like it to me."

"Miki!"

Akira sounded so scandalised that Ryou and Miki couldn't help but laugh at him.

"If I can get to a computer, I can rent an apartment in the city for myself. No adult ever needs to know," Ryou said once they were done with laughing. "It'll be fine."

Nothing would ever be fine, not truly, but it would be a start at any rate.

Akira looked upset. "But you'll be lonely."

Miki answered before Ryou could.

"I'll be going back to the city at the end of summer. I can keep an eye on him."


	3. Chapter 3

Living alone was harder than Ryou expected. He had a perpetual sense of bleak emptiness, only ever as far away as a thin shell of distraction, a shell which could shatter open at any moment. It was worse than the void of the air beneath the plane had been when it tore apart. 

What was the point of any of it? No matter what efforts he made to strengthen Akira it wouldn't be enough in the end. Human lives were so fragile and small. What if all of it was doomed no matter what he did?

"You're thinking too much, as usual."

Ryou blinked himself out of his reverie. Miki had brought a veritable entourage with her on this particular occasion, with a friend from school -- also named Miki, so nicknamed Miko to avoid confusion -- and her own little brother both in tow. 

Taro Makimura's health had improved a little over time, and now the boy was an ordinary inquisitive toddler, exploring everything on wobbly uneven legs and leaving inexplicable sticky patches on everything he touched.

Ryou didn't think of himself as especially fastidious, despite the white-on-white colour scheme he'd selected throughout his penthouse. Still, sometimes it was hard to stop himself from wincing when Taro smeared tahini or jam on the walls.

"He's not allowed peanut butter at his daycare, in case some of the other children have allergies. So now he's obsessed with tahini and jam sandwiches, even though they seem disgusting to me," Miki said now, as she wiped away the latest bit of food-graffiti. She had a talent for carrying a conversation by herself, a skill that often proved necessary when talking to Ryou. Blogging probably helped her hone the art of being chatty on her own.

"You both have so much energy even when there's no meat in your diet. It's crazy," Miko remarked, watching Taro dart away from Miki's attempts to capture him.

"There's lots of vegetarian ways to get protein." Miki's tone had the mild automatic defensiveness of someone exhausted with justifying themselves. "Japanese diets don't have as much meat as lots of other kinds, anyway."

"I wasn't... I was just  _saying_." Now equally defensive, Miko's cheeks flushed a little as she tried to backpedal from her remark. "I just... You're always so  _fast_."

Ryou could hear the curdled little curl of resentment in Miko's voice. He didn't know the girl, having only met her for the first time that day, but was willing to wager that she'd been the golden child on the middle-school track team before Miki's recent rise to athletic prowess.

The absurd irony of the situation was that Ryou was fairly certain that Miki's dedication to running had stemmed at least partially from an unconscious desire to win attention and praise from her parents, to prove herself as interesting as the adorable Taro.

Everyone always resented someone else. Satan was jealous of humanity, while Michael envied Satan's position as most beloved angel, while...

Ryou shook his head to clear his thoughts. These visits from Miki were the best distraction from himself that his life provided; there was no reason to squander them by getting lost inside himself while she was here.

He looked again at Miko. She seemed like an ordinary enough adolescent girl, albeit one with a gaze that betrayed a darker nature behind her normality: viciously ambitious, a little bitter, choked up with the mess of competitive admiration that so many people carried inside them.

There were little spots of dirt beneath her short fingernails. A gardener, then.

"Should I get plants for this place, do you think?"

Miko, surprised at being addressed directly by Miki's weird friend, took a moment to reply. Ryou watched as she glanced around the airy open space, frowning slightly to herself.

"I don't know... You might not like the dirt involved very much."

"He's dirtier than you think," Miki cut in with a wicked grin. "He didn't own a single piece of clothing when I first met him."

Ryou rolled his eyes. "When you phrase it like that it makes me sound like some kind of hedonist pervert."

"Yeah. That's the joke. Honestly, sometimes talking to you is like trying to explain humans to a space alien." 

Miko just stared at Ryou throughout the exchange. "Miki didn't tell me anything about you. Just that you're her friend, and that I wasn't allowed to tell any adults about you. Who  _are_  you?"

"I'm nobody." Quite literally; there were no formal records of him anywhere since the plane crash. He'd made sure of that. All the expenses related to the apartment were routed through a Byzantine maze of shell identities and false documents. For all intents and purposes, Ryou didn't exist at all.

"Nobody's nobody," Miko countered.

Ryou raised an eyebrow. "I would have thought you'd know better than anybody how invisible a person can be when they live without their name."

She flushed a bright pink, half-embarrassed and half-annoyed. "You shouldn't get plants here. You'd forget them and kill them."

"You could come look after them for me."

"Why would I do that?"

"I don't know. Why would you?"

Miki gave a delighted hoot of laughter, scooping up the wriggling Taro in her arms. "He  _likes_  you, Miko."

"I'm not interested in girls," Ryou told her, but Miki looked unconvinced.

* * *

So Miko started making regular visits of her own, to tend to the plants Ryou bought for his apartment. 

"I've never seen any of these types before. Are they foreign?"

"Yes, from South America. I was born there."

"Oh. When Miki said you were from America, I assumed..."

"That's not wrong either. I lived in the United States just before I came back to Japan."

"The more about you I find out, the more of a mystery you are." The statement was more complaint than compliment. "But... You've chosen nice plants. They're pretty."

Sometimes Miki and Miko would bring over board games to play against him, or puzzles to complete together. He liked those. Other times they'd make him watch soccer or baseball on the television with them, which he found perplexing.

"I understand competition, and I understand collaboration, but I'm still unsure as to why people enjoy competitive collaboration," he confessed, observing the small figures darting across the screen. "Wouldn't it be more beneficial for the players to each compete on their own individual merit, instead of being dragged down to the level of inept teammates, or relying on the strength of others to achieve victory?"

Miki just called him a space alien, as usual, which didn't help him understand anything. He had faint memories of playing games with Akira involving competitive collaboration, relay races of team against team. As far as Ryou could recall, he'd been stubbornly useless at them, refusing to participate in something he didn't understand no matter how often the rules were explained to him.

He'd probably made Akira cry. Ryou seemed to have a talent for that, whether he wanted to or not.

Even murkier and more distant in his memory than his games with Akira, Ryou could remember watching the children of the tribe he'd been born to playing games together. He'd never even tried to participate in those. He'd known from the beginning that he wasn't one of them; that they were afraid of him. Even when he'd been no older than Taro was now, he'd known that it was his destiny to be alone. His punishment.

Between Miki and Miko's visits, Ryou used his spare time reading anthropological texts and journals, or watching documentaries online. For a while he became fascinated with the Kumari, young girls in Nepal who were worshipped as manifestations of divine feminine energy. They never spoke in public, and in private only to immediate family. Their feet could never touch the ground, at least not until their first period or a serious illness. At that time, the divine was said to have left them for a new vessel, and the girl was abandoned back into ordinary life.

Ryou wondered if they were lonely, or if they were pleased and proud of their divinity. Or if, like him, they'd never felt certain that they really felt anything at all.

He remembered enough of how things had gone before (if indeed it had been a 'before', and not some other world, or hallucination, or vision of things to come) to know that he'd completely forgotten his early childhood in the jungle until very near the end of all of it. This time (if he was currently experiencing true reality, and not some uniquely cruel punishment set for him by an eternally vengeful heavenly Father) Ryou could recall a little bit, but still not very much.

He decided to start discovering what he could from textbooks and the internet. After all, it was as much a part of his heritage as any other human culture he'd lived in. Being given a gourd cup full of hot new blood inside his little thatched palm-leaf shrine had shaped him just as much as the communion wine he'd tasted in the chapel of his Catholic school, whether he remembered it as clearly or not.

"I don't know how you can watch all of those. I'd get nightmares," Miki said one day, scrolling through his YouTube history. Ryou batted her hands away and took the laptop from her, closing the lid before she could pry further into his online activities.

He knew she wasn't safe, not truly, no matter whether she knew about him or not, but he was very good at lying to himself about whether his actions could change things. The less she knew about him, the better her chances were. Perhaps.

"I think it's actually quite beautiful," he told her, opening one of his books to show her one of his favourite pieces. It was an Aztec scene, depicting a sacrifice to the god Huitzilopochtli. "They cut the hearts out and offered them up to the sun, to prevent the end of the world. Warriors who died in this way became part of an immortal army."

Miki just made a face of disgust. "Why can't you just look up weird comedy skits and vloggers like the rest of us?"

Miko leaned over, pointing to one of the other pictures in the book. "Why are there butterflies and snakes in this one, instead of a person?"

"They sacrificed those, too."

"They sacrificed  _butterflies_?" She frowned. "That's  _stupid_."

"All religions are, if you want to get technical about it." Ryou grinned at her. "It's only faith that makes them elegant or profound, I think. But I'm probably the last person who should be offering an opinion."

Miki shook her head. "For someone who spends all his time looking at YouTube, you sure have managed to miss the point.  _Everyone_  can have an opinion there, no matter what. That's the beauty of it, and the problem with it."

Ryou sighed. "Not this again..."

"I'm serious! You need to join social media. You're so isolated here. Akira's useless at email, and now that Taro's started being able to talk I can't bring him here while I'm babysitting -- he might tell our parents about you. So I won't be here as much, and Miko's busy too. You need other friends!"

"What part of 'nobody can know I exist' sounds to you like 'time to get a Twitter account'?"

"Twitter is notorious for how easy it is to be anonymous! Come on, please?"

He shook his head. "It's dangerous."

"As opposed to sleeping with a bread knife under your pillow, which is totally safe."

Ryou sighed. " _Fine_. I'll make a Twitter account. Happy?"

Miki gave him a sunny grin. "Yes."

* * *

He never volunteered any personal information about himself, instead using the account to link to videos and articles he found interesting, or to share small anecdotes about how his plants were doing or how incomprehensible he continued to find team sports. 

Despite Ryou's best efforts to keep it impersonal, the pervading sense of doom that always hung heavy in his mind came through in the tweets anyway -- at least, he assumed it did, based on how often Miki complained that he was depressing.

Much to his puzzlement, he quickly amassed a huge following, with bloggers describing him as "an entertaining persona fusing a backwoods prepper and Mr Spock" and complimenting the esoteric bloodthirstiness of the hard-to-find documentaries he linked to.

After a while, he started to feel annoyed at the number of documentaries he couldn't find online, and created a YouTube channel in order to rip and upload some of the shows only available in hard copy.

_Preserving and sharing data is ultimately futile, of course,_  he wrote after pasting the link to one of the videos,  _but perhaps there's some temporary satisfaction in making these widely accessible._

As was becoming standard, the first few replies were all variations on  _lol classic_  and  _I love you_.Ryou frowned at his feed, perplexed.

Then Akira left a reply.  _It would be awesome if you'd do commentary on these!!_

The message was in Japanese. Ryou tended to post his tweets in both Japanese and English, even though he knew even that choice offered some clues and context about who he was. But most of the content he found was in English, so it made sense to share it to an English-speaking audience, and if he didn't write in Japanese as well then none of his very few friends would be able to gain anything from his presence online, when it was their fault he was even there in the first place.

Commentating over a whole documentary, especially when it already had a voice-over, seemed like a less than ideal way of approaching things. Instead, Ryou decided to select one of this favourite videos and do a short introductory lecture to it in both English and Japanese. 

"This old, rather bizarrely animated cartoon is based on Gnostic and Jewish oral traditions from the Arabian Peninsula," he explained to his camera. He knew it was risky putting his face out into the world, but Ryou was restless and lonely and bored, and it wasn't as if anyone knew who the face belonged to, was it? 

He wanted some kind of connection to the world. It was a weak and pointless impulse, perhaps, but one that was difficult to ignore. It had been a very long time since he'd felt properly part of anything.

"The story concerns how the serpent first managed to infiltrate the garden of Eden. A peacock carries the snake in its beak, after the snake tells the peacock that all creatures are mortal and that someday its beauty will vanish. The peacock promises to help the snake in exchange for a piece of fruit from the tree of eternity.

"While this cartoon specifically doesn't deal with the wider alternative interpretations of the Eden story, the fact that the peacock is ignorant of its own finite lifespan until the serpent offers it that knowledge raises many questions about to what degree the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is a metaphor for the snake imparting truths that God wished to keep hidden from humanity..."

The video was twenty-two minutes in English, twenty-eight in Japanese because of the need to elaborate on concepts not easily translatable. Ryou felt certain that Akira, Miki, and Miko would all find the topic of discussion depressing and dull, and that his strange Twitter audience would assume it was some kind of weird performative comedy piece.

He was right on both counts, but a third group now joined his following, comprised of academics and scholars interested in debate and discussion. His view count went up and up and up.

_Taro loves the cartoon_ , Miki tweeted.  _He says the weird bird is cool_.  

Providing weird bird cartoons to his friend's little brother aside, Ryou wondered if there couldn't be some wider application for his unexpected and growing fame. He was just about old enough that would have started high school by now, but that was still very young -- who could say how much attention his every pronouncement would get by the time he was a full adult? It would hardly be the first time he'd commanded legions with a word, after all.

His thoughts went wild with imagined scenarios. What if he could hold the dark at bay by steering the direction of the future? It had been a simple enough thing for him to bring ruin to the world, in that other-time that haunted his nightmares, that version of reality where the sky held a single moon and Akira had been cold and lifeless in his arms.

Could saving the world prove to be as easy as destroying it had been? If Ryou became a politician, used this unconscious power that made people look at him and listen to his words...

Humans and demons would always be at odds. He knew there was no total accord to be found between the two, no matter what the circumstances. Their goals and needs were too incompatible with one another. But hadn't that been true for human armies and cultures fighting one another throughout history? Hadn't some balance always been found in the end, no matter how imperfect it might be? Diplomatic treaties were just a matter of hard work, of both sides making whatever compromises they could tolerate.

Fostering chaos and violence had been laughably simple, last time. Turning people against each other had been hardly any work at all. Could it really be so much more difficult to do the opposite?

Ryou made more videos, engaged more with his Twitter followers. He began to plan.

One night, when the darkness pressed heavily on his heart, the video he uploaded was more introspective and subdued than normal.

"The documentary I've got for you tonight is about Amazonian tribes, a particular area of interest of mine. When a child is born with deformities, it's almost always left out in the jungle to die. When twins are born, one is sent back to the gods. But outsiders who protest these actions are accused of interfering with cultural traditions. Women are often beaten terribly by their husbands, but to express anger that this happens is to be accused of disrespecting their society. How... how do we find a way forward? What's the answer? How do I make sense of anything, when I can't even understand how to make humans agree with each other? Is there any point to even trying to stop violence, when it's ingrained so deeply?"

Akira left one of the first replies on the video.  _It's not up to you to solve all the world's problems, man_.

Ryou gave a hard, mirthless laugh, touching his fingertips to the screen over the lines of the comment.

"Oh, love," he muttered softly. "What if it is?"

* * *

Miko was over and tending to the plants on the afternoon when a frantic pounding sounded from Ryou's front door.  

He checked the security system, surprised to see Miki and a young boy standing outside.

"Taro?" Ryou asked as he opened the door. "You've gotten so big, I didn't even recognise you."

The kid stared up at him with puffy, bloodshot eyes. "I was so hungry," he murmured in a dazed voice. "I couldn't help it."

"I'm sorry, I didn't know where else to go, I need to scrub him off before we go home, I'm sorry, I..." Miki babbled. She was still actively crying, wiping at her nose with the back of her hand, the charming put-together high school student temporarily subsumed underneath a panicking wreck.

Ryou ushered them both inside and locked the door, guiding them in to sit on the couch. Miko stood in shock, staring at them with the watering can still in her hands.

Taro was wearing what was clearly his sister's hoodie over his clothes, the arms much too long and the body too wide. The reason became obvious as soon as he unzipped it: his own t-shirt and shorts underneath were soaked with thick spatters of blood. And now that Ryou knew what to look for, he could see traces of gore around the boy's mouth, as well, wiped away hurriedly by a dry tissue or cloth.

"We were at the park, and I couldn't see him, and then I found him and he had a  _crow_ , he'd torn it to pieces and he was _eating_..." Miki broke down into sobs, followed a moment later by her brother's own wails. 

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he gulped, tears spilling down his cheeks. "I was just so  _hungry_."

Ryou wanted to fall to his knees and scream.  _No, no, this can't be happening, not yet, it's too soon, I'm not ready_.

So much for dreams of becoming a politician, of brokering peace between human and demonkind. The apocalypse was thundering down on them while they were all still so far from adulthood.

"Miko, help her go wash her face," he said, surprised at how calm he sounded considering the dark rushing chaos he felt inside his head.

She nodded, her own surprising calm equal to his own, and guided Miki away towards the bathroom.

Ryou sat down on the couch beside Taro, gathering the little boy into his arms the way he remembered Jenny doing for him. He felt very, very old. 

Holding the boy on his lap, he grabbed his phone off the coffee table and selected one of the more versatile delivery services he kept in his address book. Nothing was hard to get if you had the right connections, and Ryou knew them all.

"I need, hm," he thought for a moment. "A full cooked turkey, and a variety of pork -- cooked and uncooked, a selection, all right? As fresh as possible for the raw portions, fresh enough that they haven't even been refrigerated if possible. Delivered immediately, of course. And a bottle of Suntory Hibiki; the fifty-thousand should be fine."

One of the first things that Jenny had taught him was that money made anything possible; Ryou had rarely been more grateful for the fact than he was at that moment. With any luck the whisky would help Miki feel a little calmer.

"Damn. I should have ordered you some new clothes to wear. I'll call again once the food arrives," Ryou said, stroking Taro's head on top of his baseball cap. Taro mumbled something. "Hmm, what was that?"

"I know you."

"You used to come here with Miki when you were very young. I'm surprised you remember."

"No. I  _know_  you. The... I... The part of me that's hungry knows you. It knows your real name."

Ryou wanted to howl. It wasn't  _fair_. He wasn't  _ready_.

He didn't care how childish and irrational those feelings were. He might as well be as childish and irrational if he liked, since it wasn't going to make any difference at all to what happened next. 

"Shhh. We'll talk about that later, all right? For now, just hold on until the food gets here, and then you won't have to be hungry anymore."

Placated for the time being, Taro nodded, and snuggled in against Ryou's chest. The blood on his clothes left stark red smears across the white cotton of Ryou's shirt, bright as a torn-out heart.

His phone chimed with a new message. Hoping it was the food about to arrive, he checked the screen.

_My parents are going overseas again_ , Akira had written to him. _I'm going to come live with the Makimura family._


	4. Chapter 4

He told Miki and Miko some of the truth about the situation at hand, but not all of it. The bare minimum that they needed to know was already more than anyone should have to carry; Ryou wasn't going to burden them with information that was still unnecessary for the time being. They'd have to learn the rest soon enough, provided that any of them survived that long.

"Demons exist. They possess humans, like in old horror movies. Sometimes they hollow out and replace the original host completely, in a manner not dissimilar to the infamous effect Cordyceps fungi can have--"

"Cut the YouTube ramble for today, ok?" Miki interrupted. "Just please explain to me what's wrong with my brother."

"Well, the good news is, it isn't that. He hasn't been hollowed out. While the majority of demon-human interactions are either based on simple predation or are fatally parasitic, there's a small subset in which the two organisms form a mutualistic symbiosis, such as that seen with Poaceae and endophytic fungi, wherein the endophyte prevents disease and increases drought tolerance in exchange for carbon--"

"Ryou! Please, stay on topic."

"Right. Taro's body is now host to an invading organism. Luckily, the particular demon here doesn't seem interested in overwriting the body's previous owner, but instead working together with him. In exchange for the nutrients it demands, it's strengthening his immune system and other biological processes. He'll be healthier, fitter, and faster than other children."

"Nutrients... that's why he killed the crow?"

Ryou nodded. "Demons are obligate carnivores. Their survival depends on nutrients found in animal flesh. Humans, natural omnivores, can opt to be vegetarian should they so choose. Demons absolutely cannot live without meat."

Miki's eyes welled with tears again. She glanced in the direction of Ryou's bedroom, where Taro was sleeping after eating a truly astonishing amount of the food Ryou had ordered. 

The bottle of whisky he'd bought sat on the coffee table between them. Each of the girls had taken a shot. Ryou was tempted to do the same.

"The other major change you'll see in him is that he's likely going to develop a violent, conquering streak to his personality."

Miko made a soft scoffing sound. "Well, the meat's going to be an issue, since the family's all vegetarians, but the rest we can take care of through enrolling him in lots of sports clubs. Healthier, fitter and faster sounds like a pretty great trade-off for eating some extra spare ribs, honestly. He's hit on a pretty awesome deal."

"This isn't a fucking joke," Ryou snapped at her. "People are going to die. A lot of people. Probably everyone."

Miko went red. Miki poured herself another shot. 

She swallowed it back and winced at the burn. "This is all so much."

"I know," Ryou agreed. "I'm sorry it happened to your brother."

"And you had to carry this on your own." She sounded so sad. "How horrible."

"Frankly, carrying it alone hurt less than sharing it does," Ryou told her.

When Taro woke from his nap, they did their best to instil in him the absolute importance of keeping everything a secret.

"I know it's going to be difficult to lie to your parents, but you understand how dangerous it would be for them to know, right? They can't know any of it, especially that we're not humans."

Miki looked shocked. "What? Are you like Taro, too?"

"No," her brother told her, shaking his head. "He's something else." 

* * *

 

After that, Miki began to bring Taro to Ryou's house each morning before school, leaving him there while she went for her morning run, burning off a little of her sadness and restless energy while Taro devoured heaped platefuls of meat and Ryou checked on his progress.

"This one was scared when it died," Taro commented one morning, tearing another mouthful of flesh off the raw pork rib chop.

"It tastes better?" Ryou guessed. The boy nodded, clearly relieved that he didn't have to explain. "Have you had any more fights at school?"

Taro nodded again. "But I'm doing like you said, and only going for bullies. My dad said he's disappointed in my violence but happy about my sense of justice."

Mr Makimura would probably be less happy if he'd known the 'sense of justice' was actually advice borrowed from old  _Dexter_  episodes and suggested by Satan, Ryou suspected. Still, any port in a storm, and if it was keeping Taro from further consequences then it was doing its job.

When Miki returned to collect Taro, Ryou took her aside for a moment. 

"The appetite and need for violence are about at the levels I'd expect to see after a week and a half of feeding his nature," Ryou assured her. "So he's doing fine. I realise this may seem an uncomfortable question, given his age, but have you noticed any signs of sexual precociousness?"

Miki shook her head. "He's always had a kind of dirty sense of humour, but it hasn't turned into anything different than before."

Ryou nodded. "Maturation rate isn't affected then. I'll keep an eye on it, but that's good to know. You can take him to school now."

He wondered what Taro's natural life expectancy was now that the boy had a demonic side. Would he live an ordinary human lifespan? Longer? Shorter?

Then Ryou remembered that the end of the world was just around the corner. None of them had long at all.

He got out the bottle of fifty-thousand yen whisky he'd bought to calm Miki's nerves and, even though it wasn't yet nine a.m, drank down several swallows straight from the lip.

* * *

Life went on. Akira was due to arrive in another three days. Ryou stopped being able to sleep properly at night.

"Miko's got a  _boyfriend_ ," Miki announced gleefully as soon as she was inside that afternoon.

It was rare to hear enthusiasm in her voice, these days. The shadows under her eyes were as deep and dark as the ones under Ryou's own. 

"He's not a  _boyfriend_ ," Miko shot back immediately, even as her face went tomato-red right up to her hairline. "He's a friend who's a boy, that's all. He likes my gardening."

"His name's Kukun and he _invited her_ to go  _out_  next weekend." Miki's delighted sing-song teasing made Miko's face turn even redder, which Ryou wouldn't previously have thought possible.

"Be cautious of any kind of contact with new people," Ryou warned her, frowning. "There's no way to be certain just by looking whether they're demons or not. Don't forget, Taro's situation is an outlier. Most won't have any compunction about harming humans."

"I'm not shutting myself away, like you do," Miko snapped, embarrassment shifting instantly to irritation. "What's the point in being alive in the first place if we just stay stuck and static? Don't we just have to hope things turn out to be worth the risk?"

"That's your choice to make," Ryou answered, biting back the argument he desperately wanted to have. What was the point in fighting with one of his few allies, when it was all pointless anyway?

Long after Miki had left that afternoon, when Miko was finished tending to Ryou's plants, she hung around.

"Sorry I got mad earlier. I'm more scared than I let on, honestly. But not for the reasons you think, or anything like that." She gave a bitter little laugh, directed at herself. "It's so stupid."

"Miko, our whole lives are increasingly stupid. Go ahead."

"Kukun. My boyf... friend who's a boy. He has this tattoo across his knuckles that says 'butterfly' in English. It's pretty cool, but... every time I see it, I think of that book you have. The one with the pictures about how the Aztecs used to sacrifice butterflies as well as people."

"Well." Ryou couldn't help but smile. "I bet you don't think about that whenever you meet a person, right? So why worry when you meet a butterfly?"

Miko scowled. "Don't be an asshole. I'm a gardener; I see butterflies get eaten up by spiders all the time. I don't  _know_  why Kukun's tattoo bothers me so much. It just _does_."

Ryou wondered if her discomfort was based on some echo from a previous world, a malevolent sense of deja vu. He hoped not. He didn't want anyone else to have to bear the burden of memory that he did. God couldn't possibly hate any of them enough to do that to them, not like He hated Ryou.

That night he got a direct message over Twitter from Miki.  _Sorry if you wanted to ask Miko out, but you've had years, so you probably deserved to have her stolen._

_I'm not interested in girls_ , he wrote back.

After a long moment, her reply arrived. 

_If the world really is going to end, you shouldn't hide away from everyone anymore. It's not like you having a life is going to make things worse. Whatever it is you're scared of can't be worse than the apocalypse, right? So you should come to dinner when Akira arrives in a few days._

It would give him an opportunity to bring an extra serving of meat to Taro in the evening, as well as the usual morning meal. 

_All right. I'll come._

Miki used a string of various sparkly-looking emojis in response.

The other tabs Ryou had open in his browser had much more depressing content than the chat, however. No matter how much he wanted to pretend that it wasn't the case, there was no avoiding the fact that the demon activity was happening more rapidly this time than it had in the reality he remembered. 

What if it just got worse and worse with every reset? What if he'd been in this same life a hundred times before, a million times before, each one successively more horrific than the last? What if he was just going to see Akira die and die for all eternity?

He had a variety of guns and bladed weapons secreted throughout the penthouse. Perhaps he should use one of them to kill himself. Would the timeline continue without him? Did reality exist independently of his presence within it, or was all of this nothing but an elaborate cell to contain his punishment?

It was a moot point, because Ryou knew he wasn't going to commit suicide. The notion of dying without seeing Akira again, the idea of leaving Miki to cope alone with Taro's condition, those thoughts kept him tethered to this life.

Ryou wasn't sure he was even capable of being truly suicidal. His self-esteem was too great.

He shut the laptop and went over to one of his bookshelves, pulling down one of the innumerable tomes of apocrypha he'd collected over the years. This one had an illustration of Eden by Al-Hakim Nishapuri on the cover, showing the peacock beside the door with the serpent. 

Ryou made a mental note to himself to show the book to Taro, who'd liked the 'weird bird' in the cartoon of the same tale so long ago.

He opened now to the story of Moses meeting Satan on the slopes of Sinai, when Moses asked about Satan refusing to be humble before humanity.

_God cast me away, and turned me from angel to devil_ , the Satan in the story replied.  _But it is a temporary condition. Someday I may return to the light of heaven, despite my banishment for defiance. I work now to prove the weakness in men's hearts, to show I was right in my refusal to bow before them._

"Yeah, let me know how that works out for you," Ryou muttered, shutting the book again. The idea that God would ever be kind enough to engage in argument, to hear counterpoints to His plan, was laughable. There was no compromise in heaven, no collaboration. Exile was a permanent condition, and only the beginning of the punishments that the Lord could devise.

* * *

"This meal is delicious."

 Miki grinned, turning to her parents across the dinner table. "From him, you should take that as extremely high praise. Ryou's usually totally boring about food, so for him to even notice the taste of a meal means it's amazing. All that money and he never wants to order nice food or go to restaurants or _anything_. Oh, speaking of going places, Miko asked me if I wanted to come out with her, her new boyfriend, and his friends on the weekend. She says some of the friends really like my social media stuff."

"Our celebrity's got groupies," Ryou teased. Miki rolled her eyes.

"You've got way more followers online than I do. I bet you've got groupies too, you're just too clueless to know when someone likes you. Hey, you and Akira should come along on the weekend as well."

"Perhaps. We'll see."

Taro chomped down on another mouthful of his own meal, still chewing as he spoke. "Akira, a bunch of Miki's fans online call her Miki the Witch. Are you gonna have a cool spooky nickname too, now that you're staying here?" 

Akira laughed. "I don't think I'd make a very good warlock or devil, Taro, would I? I'm too much of a scaredy-cat for that."

"Don't worry," Ryou assured Akira. "Everyone who sees  _The Wizard of Oz_  always likes the cowardly lion more than they like the witch, anyway."

Miki pretended to glare at him. "Hey, whose side are you on here? You're as heartless as the tin-man." She ate another mouthful of dinner. "Now I think about it, I haven't seen that movie in years. Probably since I was younger than Taro."

"I haven't seen it at all," Taro told her. "It sounds  _weird_."

"It's doubtlessly available on one of the streaming services I subscribe to," said Ryou. "You can all watch it on my TV sometime if you wish."

"That would be awesome." Akira gave him a beaming grin. "Remember when we were really small, Ryou, we used to watch _Devilman_ on TV together? And draw pictures of him? Or, well, I drew pictures, and you'd tell me all the mistakes I made compared to how the show looked."

Miki gave a snort. "Yeah, that sounds about right."

Taro perked up excitedly. " _Devilman_? I love that show too!" 

"Great! We can all watch it together!"

"Count me out. That's such a boy show."

"Aw, Miki, don't be like that. It's not a boy show... it's a  _man_  show!"

Ryou only paid slight attention to the banter thrown back and forth across the table. He could remember the action show he'd watched with Akira, yes. He wondered if its existence was a ripple from the earlier timeline, the product of some producer's hazy memories of seeing a real hero in another life, recollections only slightly clearer than whatever Miko could almost remember about her butterfly-boy.

But... Ryou could remember _Devilman_ existing on television in that earlier timeline, as well, long before Akira had ever transformed. 

How many echoes of forgotten things influenced their actions in their lives? How many loops had they gone through that Ryou had lost entirely, that even Jenny hadn't been able to retain?

He forced himself to eat the remainder of his meal out of politeness to his hosts, but his appetite had vanished.

After they'd eaten, Ryou, Akira, Taro and Miki sat together in the living room. Tako, the Makimura family's sleek black cat, butted its head against Ryou's hand until he gave in to the demand and began to pet it. It purred happily at the attention.

When Ryou looked up, it was to see Akira watching him with a soft smile. "What?"

"When we were kids, you used to be so frightened of animals."

"Well, in my defence, animals usually hate me," Ryou replied, lifting his hand away as the cat climbed across him and settled on Taro. 

"I'm glad you and the animals both know better now, then." Akira was still smiling. "You've grown up."

They stayed there so long, talking about nothing much, that Taro and the cat both fell asleep, curled up together against the corner of the couch.

"You should film them for your channel," Miki told Ryou, keeping her voice soft so she wouldn't disturb them. "A little sweetness to counteract all your gloom and doom."

"I don't have my camera with me, though. Just my phone."

"Pfft. I'm sure your phone has a better resolution than most people's pro cameras. Right?"

"Yeah, you got me," Ryou conceded. "Okay, hang on a second."

He stood up carefully, adjusting his angle for the best shot. The little boy and the cat looked impossibly peaceful together. It didn't seem fair that such a moment could exist in a world hurtling towards ruin.

"Housecats, like all cats, are obligate carnivores," Ryou commentated quietly. "That means they don't have any choice about killing to survive. It's in their nature, and the only way they can endure. But we love them anyway, don't we? As bloodthirsty as they are, we take care of them, and make them our companions. I wonder if we'd be so forgiving if they were large enough to be a threat." 

Miki gave a derisive scoff. "You're contradicting the point of filming something sweet when you add a voiceover like that, you know. You really need to lighten up sometimes." 

She glanced at Akira, and then back at Ryou. "Why don't the two of you go back to Ryou's place for tonight? It'll give you a chance to catch up, since you haven't seen each other in so long. And Akira's room here could probably do with another night of airing out before he moves in." 

Without waiting for either of them to reply, Miki bent down and scooped Taro off the couch, the cat still in his arms. As she stood up again, her eyes briefly met Ryou's own, and she gave him a pronounced wink. The next moment she'd turned away, carrying Taro towards his bed. "See you both later."

Ryou couldn't believe how ridiculous and hilarious Miki constantly proved herself to be. Even in the midst of all the fear and strangeness their lives held now, she was playing at match-maker. How absurd, how wonderful. 

* * *

The two of them ended up lying on their backs on the enormous balcony of Ryou's penthouse. He seldom went out there on his own, finding the vastness of space overwhelming to take in. It wasn't so bad with Akira there, though.

"Remember all the fairytales about the moons we knew when we were kids? I'd tell them to you, and then you'd say that it was all fake, and they were just cold dead rocks, and I'd cry?"

"Mm." Ryou nodded. The memory was like a double-exposed negative for him, stories of one moon overlaid with stories of the pair. Two lives, two moments. Akira was the constant across realities.

Ryou sat up. "There's something I have to tell you. I want you to be the first one who knows all of it, but... I don't know how to tell you without making it terrible."

Akira sat up as well, looking at Ryou with wide, concerned eyes. Almost none of the stars were visible above them, because the lights of the city were so bright all around. "Something bad happened, didn't it?"

"A few weeks ago--"

"No, before that. Before you showed up in the cave that summer. Something terrible happened to you."

Ryou looked away, swallowing hard. "It's... a lot more complicated than that."

Before he could say anything else, Akira was kissing him. It was a very tentative, light kiss, as if Akira was afraid of being shoved away in disgust at any moment. An innocent kiss, a young kiss.

Ryou didn't think he'd ever felt this young before.

He opened his mouth, letting his tongue slip past his lips to taste Akira's. Akira sighed happily, his breath a warm soft gust as their mouths pressed together again, both of them smiling.  

After quite some time (who knew that simply kissing could be so  _nice_?) they eventually managed to go back indoors, making their way to Ryou's room together. They held each other's hand as they walked, as if each of them was worried that the other would disappear if they stopped touching.

They resumed kissing once they were on the bed, but there was an increasing heat inside Ryou, an ache to touch every part of Akira, to love and worship this fragile, flawed, glorious mortal body before him.

"I want to..." Suddenly lost for words, Ryou pressed his palm against the growing hardness in Akira's slacks. "Can I? Just... just my hand, we don't have to go beyond that, I..."

Akira laughed, a happy shocked sound, and nodded. "Yeah, yeah, let's... yeah."

"I've got... hang on." Blushing at the clumsiness of all his words, Ryou sat back a little, pulling open the drawer of his nightstand. He retrieved the bottle of lubricant and was about to close the drawer again when Akira caught his wrist and stopped him.

"Wait, don't close it yet. I wanna see what kind of porn you use," Akira teased, eyes bright in his flushed face.

Ryou gave a snort. "Sorry to disappoint, but I don't use any."

"Oh, right. You're utilitarian about food, so you probably are about this too, huh? Just keeping the body in working order, nothing but biology."

"I'm not  _that_  utilitarian, Akira. I just prefer my own imagination to pornography."

"Well, what do you think about, then?"

Ryou couldn't look at Akira. He felt too exposed, too bared to make eye contact as he answered in a small voice.

"You. It's always been you."

Akira gave a breathy, shocked little laugh and then they were kissing again. They fumbled at each other's clothes and at their own, eventually shedding enough to press their chests skin to skin, the closeness and intimacy enough to make them both somewhat shy and hesitant.

In this arena, at least, the Satan part of Ryou's self was as inexperienced and tentative as the mortal element. The only thing that made any of it easier was undertaking this exploration with Akira. Nothing could ever be absolutely frightening, so long as Akira was there.

Ryou poured lubricant on his palm, letting it sit there for a few seconds to warm it with his body heat before wrapping his hand around Akira's length. It was so delicate, so alive, like all the rest of him. Alive, alive. Ryou could feel Akira's pulse. It was like cradling a hot, still-beating heart in his hand, like the offerings of devotion he'd been given by the tribe once upon a time. This was a kind of devotion to, one Ryou was offering to Akira.

Akira clutched at Ryou's shoulder, pulling him close so their could kiss again as Ryou found a steady rhythm with his hand. 

"Let me, let me touch you too..." Akira managed to gasp, his own hands fumbling for the lubricant and then for Ryou's own cock. 

Being together with Akira, pleasuring him and being given pleasure in return, kissing and kissing like nothing else could ever possibly be as important as being together... all of it made Ryou feel genuinely, sincerely afraid that he was seconds away from crying. If anything had ever deserved the shedding of tears, the sublime happiness he felt in that moment did.

He knew that the happiness he felt was going to make the plummeting misery to come even worse, the horror sharper and deeper. But in that moment the price felt worth it. It all felt worth it. Infinite loops, if that was to be his fate. He'd carry that, in exchange for this. The chance to love Akira was so infinitely valuable that Ryou didn't feel afraid anymore.

 

* * *

After they were done, Ryou pulled his coat on and went back out onto the balcony, lighting a cigarette and staring up at the moons. 

He tried to remember as many details of the earlier timeline as he could. The deaths of Akira's parents would be soon, if events remained in a similar order to last time. 

Ryou understood loss now, in ways it had been completely opaque to him then. He didn't want Akira to have to experience that.

Was what he was feeling now empathy? It was so weighty and dense in his chest, like a knot of borrowed pain.

How many other things were coming that he couldn't recall at all?

He wished he knew how many loops had come before, what he'd forgotten.

"I didn't know you smoked." 

Akira was wearing one of Ryou's own nightshirts, and the sight of him in it was so expectedly erotic that Ryou wondered if it was possible to avert the apocalypse by staying in bed for the rest of eternity.

He flicked a bit of ash off the cherry and shrugged. "Hard to think in the long term, all things considered."

"Will you tell me what you were trying to say earlier? When I, um, interrupted?"

Ryou sighed. "Mm. Soon. But for now, let's just... stay here. Just for tonight."

Akira smiled. "Okay."

* * *

 

_To: Ryou Asuka, Akira Fudou_

_From: Miki Makimura_

_Here's the info Miko sent me about where we're going on the weekend. I expect both of you to attend. No excuses! If I'm destined to be called Miki the Witch forever, the least I can do is persuade my friends to come to a Sabbath with me, right? Hehe!_


	5. Chapter 5

As the sun rose, he told Akira all of it. 

Ryou started with Jenny's death and worked from there. He told Akira about the memories and revelations that had ripped a gash through the centre of his identity, the way reality had splintered out around him as he tumbled through the howling dark.

He told Akira about the other life he could remember, the slaughter and loss all across the world. The bitter hard-earned lessons and endless regret Ryou had felt at the end of it all, when he finally understood the meaning behind the things that had come before but too late, too late. 

Ryou told Akira all of it, because the burden was too heavy to carry alone anymore. Because he wanted Akira to know exactly how monstrous and horrible Ryou was. 

He'd let himself have one night of love. He knew it was more than he could ever deserve, after all the things he'd done, but he was selfish. And now it was time to tell Akira the truth, even though it meant Akira would hate him forever. 

When Ryou finally finished speaking, Akira wept.

For once, Ryou didn't regret making Akira cry, because his own tears were long used up, and to hear Akira's sobs was a terrible kind of catharsis for his own aching heart. 

Ryou stood up from the couch where they sat. Akira raised his head from where his face had been buried in his hands. He looked a wreck, snotty and puffy and miserable, and Ryou loved him more than all the world.

"Wh-Where are you going?"

"I thought you'd prefer to be alone."

Akira was on his feet and clutching Ryou in an embrace before Ryou knew he was moving.

"But... you must hate me," Ryou said in confusion.

"Maybe if I could remember any of it for myself, I would," Akira answered, still holding him. "Maybe I'd hate you then. But I'd love you even when I hated you. I'm sure that's how I felt, even if I can't remember feeling it. I'm certain."

"Seems like it would be much easier to just hate me, to be honest."

Akira gave a sniffly laugh, burying his face against Ryou's shoulder. "No offence, but if I cared about choosing what was easy, I wouldn't have ended up liking you as much as I do in the first place."

"I think you'll find I'm  _extremely_  easy. I was giving you a handjob twenty-five minutes after our first kiss."

Another laugh, thick and wobbly from the tears still caught in Akira's throat, but a real laugh nonetheless. "You suck."

"No, we haven't tried that yet, but since you're inexplicably still interested in spending time with me even after finding out that I'm capable of genocide, I guess it's still a possibility for the future. I might not be very good at it, though."

Akira's laughter took on a slightly manic edge. "If you'd spent less time on ending the world and more time on blowjobs the first time around, you wouldn't have stage fright now. That'll teach you."

Ryou's phone, which had been vibrating all night with its usual stream of alerts and emails, gave another shudder across the surface of the coffee table.

"See? You do know--" A yawn cut Akira's words apart. "Some things about romance. You've stayed off the--" Another yawn. "Internet all night, just to spend time with me."

Ryou hugged Akira even more tightly. "Loser."

"I'm gonna go back to bed. To _sleep_ , this time." Akira gave a dirty little chuckle. "I need some time to digest all the things you've told me. You go check your emails like I know you want to."

"Thank you for staying," Ryou said, trying not to put the weight of just how grateful he was into the word.

"Don't stay up forever. I bet I like to cuddle," Akira said as he left Ryou to his phone.

Most of the waiting alerts were retweets of the link to his video of Taro and Tako which, as was usual for Ryou's uploads, had gone mildly viral among his strange disparate group of followers. There were also a few messages from some of his stateside brokers about his various stock portfolios, since their trading day had been ticking along in the hours Ryou had been occupied with Akira.

The email from Miki concerning her plans for the weekend was buried deep in the mix, but the moment Ryou read it he lurched from the mild dissociative boredom of online communication into an overwhelming and sickening sense of deja vu.

He thought of butterfly sacrifices and Miko's worried glare. 

The Sabbath. That had been the beginning of the end, last time.

Ryou didn't feel sleepy, not in the least, but there was a weariness in him that made him feel as if all the marrow in his bones had been turned to heavy lead. He'd read that depression could manifest itself as exhaustion, but he didn't like the idea of taking drugs on a regular basis, and suspected that even the most expensive and learned psychiatrists weren't equipped to deal with the level of defiance disorder problems and daddy issues that Satan could drop in their laps.

There was a second email from Miki, sent shortly after the first, in which she said that she wouldn't be bringing Taro round as usual the next morning, in case Ryou and Akira wanted to sleep in. There were a lot of winking emojis.

_Witch_ , Ryou wrote back. He wanted to have a real-time conversation with her about the earlier message and its plans, which he knew would have to wait until later in the day. For now, with the world barely beginning to wake up with the new morning, there was nothing Ryou could do but wait. 

He went in to the bedroom, where Akira was sprawled out across the majority of the bed despite his relatively slight size. Ryou lay down beside him, watching the movement of his eyes beneath their closed lids and the slow rise and fall of his breathing.

It suddenly seemed desperately important that Ryou bear witness to this, that he watch Akira sleep for as long as he was able to. There might never be another chance to do this ever again, because if the Sabbath was close at hand then soon things were going to change. Akira was going to change. Ryou might never be this close to this version of Akira ever again, in any world to come.

He kept his eyes open for as long as he could, like he could hold back the march of time if he just willed it hard enough. But eventually, inevitably, Ryou's own breathing became deeper and slower, and he slipped into dreaming along with Akira.

* * *

_I implore you to reconsider. I don't know how I can make myself any clearer._

Yet again, Miki's reply came back almost immediately. At least she wasn't blowing him off, despite the fact his last twenty direct messages had been variations on 'do not go to the Sabbath'.

_Ryou. It's just a rave. I know the TV and news sites make that kinda thing seem like a scary hotbed of sin but I promise, it's not that big a deal._

Ryou pinched the bridge of his nose, willing the headache away from where it was growing behind his eyes. He might as well have been mythology's Kassandra, hopelessly pleading for others to heed his prophecies, forever doomed to be ignored.

"Is  _this_  my punishment, then?" he muttered to himself.

Akira, who'd been trying his hand at Overwatch on Ryou's rarely-used Xbox, shut off the screen and turned to face Ryou.

"It seems like you think everything bad that happens to you might be part of your punishment," he told him. "But... what if it's just life? What if you're no more or less unlucky than anybody else?"

Oh, Akira. Ever the optimist, until the moment he was doomed to become a nihilist. Ryou had lost count of the number of times he'd found himself wishing that there was some way he could protect Akira from the things to come.

In fact, perhaps...

"If I asked you to turn down Miki's invitation, would you? For me? If I told you it wasn't safe?"

Akira frowned. "It doesn't seem like that big of a deal. I mean, it's probably not really my speed, but I thought it might be... fun. To go there. With you." He blushed a little. Then he cleared this throat. "Anyway, if it's not safe, isn't that more reason to go? To protect Miki and her friends?"

"You'll be more help to me if you keep an eye on Taro that night. I dislike the thought of him being alone for a whole evening without anyone cognisant of his affliction in the house." 

Puzzlement flickered across Akira's features and then a frown, as he remembered that particular element of the insane, sprawling story that Ryou had revealed. "Is he doing okay? Is he going to be all right?"

In truth, Ryou was almost certain that Taro would be fine without supervision. For a child, he was exhibiting a remarkable degree of self-control regarding his new, bloodier appetites. But a white lie to protect Akira would be quite literally the least of Ryou's sins, so he didn't feel especially bad about it.

"He's doing all right, all things considered, but it would still be better if you were there, rather than at the Sabbath."

Ryou could remember how desperate his other self had been to merge Akira with Amon.

Akira had been beautiful,  _glorious_  as a devilman... as  _the_ Devilman.

But in the end it hadn't helped. He'd died just the same. 

* * *

With Akira out of the path of the coming carnage, Ryou turned his attention to preparing for his own attendance. He would endeavour to control events as best as he was able.

He chose his extremely comfortable Maison Martin Margiela Duvet Coat, because it was outrageously expensive enough that nobody would worry too much about how absurdly bulky it was for wearing to a rave, and that absurd bulk would easily hide a Heckler & Koch MP7 and a switchblade, along with a selection of highly desirable illegal drugs which Ryou would be able to offer to anyone who got too curious about why he'd decided to accessorise with a concealed submachine gun and knife. 

The Sabbath was held within the somewhat trite symbolism of a ruined church, and for the first time Ryou found himself wondering if God could see him, if God had seen him take communion as a child. Just perversely observing Ryou's life, without informing Michael of his location. Just watching.

"This is Kukun," Miko introduced her not-a-boyfriend-just-a-friend-who-was-a-boy, who seemed pleasant enough but far more interested watching Miko's mouth and chest for someone who was really just a friend-who-was-a-boy. "And his friends Wamu, Gabi, and Hie."

"Hello." Ryou barely paid attention to the introductions, looking around at the grinding dancers and writhing young bodies, the drugs and sex and violence hanging in the air. 

He found a seat off in one of the dark edges of the room and made himself at home there, dismissing anyone who came too close with a glare or an imperious flick of his hand.

An hour went by, and then another. Miko and Kukun were entwined together in a half-collapsed love seat. Miki was dancing with two of the other boys who'd come with the group, laughing and smiling, but every time she glanced in Ryou's direction she frowned. 

That was fine. He didn't care if he was ruining her fun with his bad mood.

The gun and the knife weighed heavily on his coat. He itched to use them, to set off the terrible cavalcade of chaos. Get it over and done with. This waiting was as bad as the violence to come could possibly be, this nauseated tension behind his breastbone that was driving him crazy.

"You need to lighten up. You look like you're about to go on a shooting spree or something, glowering alone over here," Miki told him, standing over where he sat with her arms crossed. 

Ryou gave her a thin, humourless smile. "There's that witch clairvoyance showing up again."

"Ugh." With an annoyed scowl, she left again, pulling her phone out of the pocket of her extremely tight shorts as she did. Hell hath no fury like a teenage girl posting cryptic subtweets about her shitty friend.

Ryou went back to watching the crowd at large. He kept catching distortions out of the corner of his eye, bodies with proportions that weren't quite right, movements unlike those of human forms. But every time he tried to look directly at the culprit, they'd blended back into the general mass of dancers.

What on earth was he even doing here? At most, he'd be able to get Miko and Miki and some of the girls' friends out of the line of the worst of the massacre. He didn't especially relish the idea of killing demons  _or_  humans -- they were all just idiots out looking for a good time and a little pleasure, after all. Heaven might consider those to be capital offences, but Ryou tended to be more laissez-faire about such things.

"Miki says you're being an asshole. I asked how that was different from usual, but she said she was really worried about you."

No. No no  _no_.

Akira gave him an awkward smile. "Also, uh, hi, I guess. I'm here to try to cheer you up."

Ryou felt like he was going to vomit. "We're all going to die," he said, a hysterical edge on the words.

That was when the screaming started.

One of the dancers was missing both arms, a messy spray of blood splattering the crowd around him as he collapsed twitching to the ground, another dancer gnawing at the missing limbs with a razor-toothed mouth protruding from the side of her neck.

All around them, bodies were rippling and tearing, shifting like a living bad trip. The whole world was distorting into new and awful shapes, a nightmare of eyes and teeth and claws and blood.

The pulse of the bass beat and the whirl of the lights were still going, the way a chicken's nervous system will keep running even after the head has been torn off. The whole world was an animal too stupid to know it was already dead.

Ryou grabbed Akira by the hand and ran towards the last place he'd seen Miko and Miki, over by the love seats and small tables covered in drinks. Their feel slipped and skidded on the floor, now slick with blood and alcohol and other sharp-stinking fluids.

They'd nearly reached the others when their way was blocked by a sudden snakelike demon, whose jaw snapped shut and ripped away the middle section of one of the young men, leaving his head and a ruined stump of neck to fall with a sickening thud onto the filthy floor. His mouth was wide open, frozen in a moment of shock.

Ryou had the gun out from beneath his coat and his finger on the trigger a second later, firing directly into the demon. Wounded but still mobile, it swerved away to find less protected prey.

He pulled the switchblade out as well, only to have it immediately plucked from his hand by a grim-faced Miki, who flicked the blade open and shifted into a defensive stance with it. Ryou figured that was fair enough; he still owed her for the bread knife she'd brought him in the cave so many years ago. He might never have another chance after this to pay the favour back.

Seeing that Miki had armed herself, Miko grabbed a wine bottle off the table nearest to them and smashed it against the ground, brandishing her makeshift weapon by the neck. She and one of the remaining young men shoved the table over onto its side, creating a tiny area of coverage behind it.

"Come on!" she shouted to Kukun, dragging him by his arm.

"But Hie..." he said, voice numb and flat, staring at the remains of his friend. Miko ignored his protest and pulled him away.

Her face, furious and terrified, seemed strangely radiant to Ryou. There was a purity in her expression, a determination to save others from the fears and premonitions that had haunted her. Ryou could tell that Miko was mere moments away from becoming a being like Akira had been, in another world.

They all fitted behind the overturned table, but only just. 

There was blood everywhere, blood and shit. Nobody ever talked about how much shit there was when people died. The stink of it in the increasing airless environment made him gag. So much for ever having a casual smoking habit. He'd never be able to smell cigarette smoke again without remembering the rest of this along with it.

Ryou gripped his gun, but held back from firing for the time being. There was too much chance of hitting the remaining humans out among the crowd. Once upon a time, he'd seen humans as collateral, hardly worth factoring into his plans on an individual basis. But now as he looked out at the fleeing, desperate crowd, all Ryou could think was that any one of them might have plants that they took care of, or younger brothers that they loved, or someone they adored and wanted to kiss again someday.

A girl sprinting away was grabbed and wrenched back right in front of their place of shelter, her bare body smacking hard against the floor before the demon pursuing her pounced and began to feed. She shrieked and writhed for a moment, and then went still and lifeless.

Just beyond her were two young men who didn't look any older than Akira, Miki, or Miko. One of them was seriously injured, perhaps fatally so, and the other was trying to apply pressure to the pulsing wound, screaming for help that Ryou knew would never come.

He looked over at Miko with her bottle, Miki with her knife. At Akira, whom Ryou knew had the potential to become a violent, sublime, monstrous hero. Perhaps all of them had that potential. But there was no reason that they should have to be the ones to give up their humanity. Not when Ryou's own had been on borrowed time for most of his life.

Ryou grabbed Akira by the front of his shirt, pulling him in for a hard, reckless kiss. Just one more. He didn't deserve it, but he wanted it so much. He felt like he was going to suffocate from the amount of regret and sadness in his heart.

He'd certainly learned what it was to be human this time around, and it fucking ached. 

As Ryou Asuka dissolved to nothing, Satan stood up and surveyed the crowd.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains some references to Devilman Lady and Violence Jack, but hopefully in a way where it still works all right even if you aren't previously familiar with them.
> 
> Also, God is a little different in Crybaby to in other Devilman works, and I've tried to hit something like a middle ground here. It's not exactly the easiest range of canon to find consistency in!
> 
> The response to this story has been incredible and overwhelming. I don't write fic very often, so to be so warmly welcomed means the world to me. Thank you for an incredible experience, and I hope that reading this fic is even slightly as much fun as writing it was.

* * *

 

Satan's voice rang out clear and loud through the cacophony.

"Stop. This way will only bring ruin and an ending." 

Everyone turned to listen, demon and human alike, all equally transfixed by the commanding tone.

"Demons must find a way to form a covenant with humankind. That's the only possible way forward. Surely you didn't slumber all those thousands of years just to toss your life away on a few nights' worth of glutting yourself with some stimulant-riddled corpses?"

A demon with a gleaming yellow carapace chittered angrily. "When did you show up? I thought you perished when we lost Psycho Jenny." 

Satan grinned a knife smile. "I'm surprisingly difficult to kill."

"We were better off without you. Taking human form to learn their weaknesses? Ha! Their weaknesses are obvious."

"I'm surprisingly difficult to kill, but demons aren't. Your weaknesses are obvious, too." Satan waved a hand, sending out thin beams of light that sliced the demon to ribbons. Its remains fell in a neat pile, oozing ichor.

Another demon launched itself at Satan, hissing in fury. That one fell dead as well, wetter and gorier than the first. 

These actions took no effort whatsoever, not now that Satan had regained total control. They were easy, nothing. That's all Satan felt. Nothing. Numb. The bodies tore like paper.

"Are the rest of you willing to listen yet?" Satan asked in a voice as beautiful and ringing as the church bell of a school cathedral. No further attacks presented themselves. "A wise choice."

Satan turned and looked down at the children cowering behind the overturned table. Their faces were pale with reflected radiance and terror. "Miki, please use your phone to call for as many ambulances as possible."

She nodded, pulling the device out and punching in the number with shaking thumbs.

"All unharmed humans, and all demons, leave immediately," Satan told the rest of the room. "Humans who know first aid, stay and help others if you wish, but know that nobody will fault you for a decision to flee instead."

"This is bullshit!" a demon yelled out, as whiny as a petulant child. "Who died and made you--"

The attack came out of nowhere, the striking demon clearly trusting that Satan's hubris was such that the dissenting voice would be allowed to finish its complaint before receiving retribution. It was the snakelike demon that Ryou had wounded, its deadly traplike jaws closing on Satan's left forearm and left lower trunk wing and tearing them both away.

Satan didn't have a chance to retaliate before the creature was dead already, its face and head reduced to pulp by a neatly-aimed barrage of bullets from the Heckler & Koch MP7, more lethal than the panicked rain of shots Ryou had fired into it in the earlier encounter. 

Akira was holding the gun, his face streaming with tears. "Are you gonna be all right?" he asked Satan, gulping back the worst of his sobs.

The injury was serious enough to hurt, but the pain mattered less than the melancholy twist in Satan's heart at seeing Akira take up arms. It seemed curiously unfair that such nuance of human feeling should survive for Satan even now.

Satan gave a rueful little laugh. "So much for being the invincible protector, I suppose. Yes, I will be all right. I merely need a minute to rest, and I can heal myself whole again."

Miki, done with her phone call to emergency services, turned again to look at Satan. Then her gaze shifted slightly, and she began to scream.

"What makes you think you've got a minute?" Michael asked, and threw Satan through one of the stained-glass windows staring down at them.

* * *

Satan tumbled through the air for several seconds, trying to rebalance for flight with only half of one arm and one less wing. 

Michael was in hot pursuit, unharmed and radiant in glowing gold armour. In other circumstances Satan would have scoffed at such an appearance -- such a getup was nothing but vanity, the gleaming breastplate and vambraces purely for show. The two of them were as hardy as one another, equally matched in strength except for Satan's unexpected injury from the demon.

Armour wouldn't have prevented that attack, and Satan loved being gloriously unadorned. An angel's form was the ultimate perfection of God's creation, after all. It seemed stupid to stick armour over that.

Satan could give credit where credit was due, could contain contradictions now: hating and loving God's actions and choices all at once, revelling in the happiness of being perfect even while enduring the agony of a breaking heart. 

Human complexity. That much, at least, remained of Ryou.

Satan and Michael dipped and darted, manoeuvring around each other like fencers in a deadly dance, making small easily-defended strikes at one another as they each got the measure of their opponent.

They flew higher and higher, until the city was a sprawl of bright dots far below, the wind roaring and cold around them.

"Protecting humanity?  _You_?" Michael asked mockingly, aiming a punch at Satan's stomach. "Aren't you the one who said you'd  _never_  bow before them and yet here you are, with a wing and an arm gone for what? The lives of a few grubby club kids?"

"I must have missed the part where that involved bowing," Satan shot back with a sneer, landing a heel kick directly to Michael's face.

Michael snarled, grabbing Satan's ankle and twisting it until it cracked. That was fine, that was fine, they weren't going to be touching down on land any time soon, so a broken ankle wasn't important. Satan ignored the pain and flew higher, blood splattering down from the ruined wing onto Michael's head.

Michael flew forward, driving Satan back. Satan glanced up at the stars, getting the bearings of where the pair of them were now in relation to the world so far below.

"You're aiming us at North Korea. Not a bad attempt." Always important to give credit where credit was due.

Michael's grin was bloodthirsty and sharp. "Nothing like a little international strife to start the end of the world."

Satan darted low and away, redirecting their path out towards the open ocean.

"Really? Not in the mood for an apocalypse today?" Michael asked in mock surprise. "I thought you'd love that. It's like setting off dominoes. All it takes is a tiny push."

Michael tried to grab at Satan's other ankle but Satan pulled ahead and out of range. The air whistled as they shot through it, the two of them moving almost at the speed of sound.

"Don't give yourself too much credit," Satan scoffed. "It's more like kicking over a sandcastle. There's no beauty in the chain reaction, just destruction and loss."

Michael laughed. " _You're_  lecturing  _me_ about causing destruction and loss? Really?"

A sudden burst of speed and Michael had caught up, grabbing Satan's throat with one gold-clad hand, squeezing so hard the armoured glove began to buckle and bend.

"Even in the end, that Psycho Jenny creature was protecting you," Michael sneered. "Want to see what she kept hidden?"

The assault of memory was like a heat-white dagger to the forebrain. Satan screamed, seizing violently in Michael's grip, every limb and wing convulsing under the onslaught.

Timelines and timelines and timelines, realities tangled and snarled together like abandoned yarn. Cruel worlds, barren worlds.

"Not all of your punishments were of heaven's devising, you know. You've always had a talent for finding your own worst tortures for yourself."

Satan howled as memories of bloomed back into existence. A life as two beings, a brother and sister, both murdered horribly after long tortures and violations. In that particular timeline, the boy had eventually died by being torn in half at the waist.

"We didn't orchestrate any of that for you," Michael explained. "I think it's fairly easy to guess what you were punishing yourself for, though, isn't it? Did you really feel  _that_  bad about one little murder? After all, you've done so many others."

Another reset, another timeline. Again born into two bodies, another brother and sister, but this time the boy had demanded to be raised as a girl instead, hoping that this disguise would be enough to keep Michael's searching gaze from finding the angel underneath the human form for at least a little while.

Satan could remember the strange rewarding exhaustion of being Devilman Lady, of fighting a fight that had felt almost sacred. Both siblings dreaming of Akira's face, even in a world where Akira didn't exist.

But Akira _ha_ _d_  existed, just not on Earth. Satan could remember finding him in hell, that intense earnest expression so dear and familiar even when they were strangers to one another. They'd touched and loved and found pleasure together, and even in hell that union had been holy and good and vital. Perhaps especially in hell.

Always, no matter what, they could find one another. They could love one another.

"He joined your war on that occasion, you know," Michael explained with unbridled delight. "I suppose it's easy to hate heaven when you've endured hell."

The barrage of memory was too much, coupled as it was with Michael's ongoing strikes and punches, one hand still squeezing Satan's throat. Satan's vision was beginning to go dark, body losing sensation.

Was this the end, then? Would there be another reset, another world of punishment, another chance to see Akira die?

Satan scrabbled weakly, pathetically at Michael's wrist.

"You've punished yourself more effectively than anyone else could, you know. And none of it would ever have happened if God hadn't created humanity." Michael's voice was taunting now, a sadistic brightness behind every word. "By all rights you should despise them even more now than you did in the beginning, and yet... what? You've suddenly decided to play at being their saviour, protecting them from their well-earned demise? After all the things they've done? After all that?"

Satan was barely conscious anymore, more injury than form, on the verge of oblivion. But the answer to Michael's question was easy and obvious.

If humanity didn't exist, there would be no Akira. There would be no direct-message arguments with Miki punctuated by too many emojis. There would be no watering can in Miko's hands, nurturing plants imported from the other side of the world until they flourished. No children who loved their cats, no children who were willing to keep the secrets of a terrified boy in a cave.

"Yes," Satan croaked. "Who could help but love them, after all that?"

Michael stared at Satan. The hand gripping Satan's throat let go, leaving Satan to cough and splutter. Slowly, a triumphant, joyous grin widened on Michael's face.

Michael's next words seemed to be speaking to the endless black of the night sky.

"I told you so."

And the cold wind and the ocean vanished.

* * *

Ryou was somewhere that wasn't anywhere.

The shift was so instant and startling that it probably wasn't all that surprising that it took him several seconds before he even noticed that he was human again.

His left arm was still gone below the elbow, the wound raw but no longer bleeding profusely. There was enough blood leaking out to make a crime scene out of the sleeve of his Margiela coat, but not enough that he was going to die of it any time soon. 

"Hello, Ryou." 

"Michael?"

The angel was bare of armour... and smiling, despite the ruined stump of one wing and a missing arm.

"No. Not Michael," Satan replied.

"But... how are we talking? Aren't we the same person?"

"It's hardly the first time we've divided our soul. For now, we are distinct from one another. You are the human part of me, and I am the divine part of you."

"You might want to consider repairing yourself a little more. You look somewhat worse for wear," Ryou noted, gesturing to Satan's wing and arm. The other injuries, from the fight with Michael, were gone.

Satan laughed, a sound as merry as birdsong. "I'm going to keep them this way, for the time being. To help remind me of knowledge gained through suffering. Of Akira saving me."

"I'm guessing that means I can't have my arm back either?"

"Don't you want to be reminded of Akira's bravery?"

"Well, I mean, sure, of course I do," Ryou grumbled. "But typing one-handed is a pain. I guess it's pretty mild as far as our punishments go, though, huh?"

"They weren't punishments." Satan's voice was quiet and gentle. "They were lessons. But we couldn't see that until we'd learned what they were teaching. The worst agonies were all things we brought on ourself, as we regretted the losses we'd caused."

"I don't understand," Ryou confessed helplessly.

"You are my redemption, Ryou Asuka. Your free will. After so much struggle and so much pain, you chose for yourself what my pride and defiance meant I could never accept as a simple order."

If he wasn't somewhere outside the physical realm, Ryou thought he'd probably be sick. "It was all God's trick," he said, aghast. "To make you see humanity's worth. All those lifetimes, all that horror... it was a trick to make us see. And it kept resetting every time we failed, until finally we didn't... Talk about overkill."

"Yeah, God's good at that," Satan agreed drily. "But if I can learn and change this much, perhaps God can too. We'll see. The fact I'm being given a second chance at all is pretty fucking surprising."

Ryou blinked. "Are angels allowed to say fuck?"

"You know as well as I do that 'allowed' isn't really a concept I'm especially good at."

"So, what now? I stop existing, you go back to heaven, humanity has to deal with demons without anybody looking out for it? Seems like a pretty shitty ending, I have to say."

"No," Satan assured him. "The demons are sleeping now. Thousands more years under the ice, until such time humanity is ready for them -- for an accord, or for a battle. I don't know which it will prove to be. Humanity is always surprising, after all. That's what makes them so remarkable."

"What about me?"

"When you're finished with your human lifespan, we'll merge into a single being again. But for now, the least I can give you by way of reward is an ordinary existence. No divinity, no damnation. Live a lifetime free of those cruelties we've so often summoned to torment ourselves with. Just be happy, surrounded by the souls you love."

"Not all the souls I love," Ryou said, thinking of Jenny.

"No, perhaps not," Satan conceded. "But no ending comes without some loss."

"I guess the old apocrypha really was right. Satan's exile was temporary." Ryou couldn't keep the astonishment out of his voice. 

Then, remembering the 'weird bird' on the cover of his book, Ryou's eyes went narrow. "What about Taro, and other people who've already got demons within them?"

"They'll be all right. As human as anyone, with the same chance at a future as you. A whole lifetime ahead."

Satan held out a hand to Ryou. "Ready?"

Ryou nodded. "As I'll ever be."

* * *

Ryou woke up in a pool of... ugh. A pool of miscellaneous disgusting things, which for his own sake he wasn't going to investigate into further specificity. 

All around him the bustle of survival was taking place. Paramedics were treating the wounded, rescuing them from the violent mess of carnage that had been a party the night before. 

Morning was breaking, the first rays of sunlight coming through the ruined stained glass window left behind after his battle with Michael.

Ryou pushed himself up into seating position with his one remaining hand, shrugging his stained white coat free from his shoulders. He looked around.

Akira was standing together with the others, all of them filthy and exhausted. Miki was taking charge as usual, deep in conversation with one of the emergency response personnel. Miko and Kukun were staying upright by leaning against one another. Kukun's friends, the two who'd survived, were watching Miki as she spoke.

Akira glanced around, looking at the wreckage covering the room. His eyes caught Ryou's gaze and widened in shock. 

"Ryou?" he asked. His voice was too quiet to hear in the noise of their surroundings, but Ryou could tell from the movement of his mouth what he'd said. 

What a beautiful, blessed thing, to have his name said by the one he loved.

Ryou climbed to his feet and walked forward.


End file.
